The Printmaker's Daughter (21 page)

“Revenge! What is that?”

“You know. A special kind of noodle. It is eaten with broth.”

This was a pun—inspired, if I may say so. My father and I made puns all the time. Sanba liked it and we started to laugh.

“Look at this one. It is the print of the ronins’ attack on the overlord. It’s night, but we can see everything. It’s what I said before. A trick. That’s what painters do.”

“Trick people or lie or tell the truth?”

“Well, truth or lies.” He was twisting my words so cleverly I was getting confused. I giggled. The painting students and my sisters looked up. My father scowled. We stepped outside the door.

“And I will tell you another thing if you are very interested,” I said.

“I am.”

“There is something very personal in this for my father. But you have to promise never to repeat it.”

“I would never repeat gossip,” said Sanba.

“Now that is a lie.”

“My lies are just like the lies you see in your father’s paintings, merely pragmatic.” He was flirting with me. I had been slow to recognize it because it had never happened before. But that’s what it was.

“Ah,” I said. I was flustered. I decided to tell him the really important part. “This bad Lord Kozuke, who was
in reality
not Kozuke but Lord Kira, was the great-grandfather of the mother of my father.”

“The great-grandfather of your father’s mother?” He rolled his eyes and counted on his fingers. “How many generations back?”

“Four. Or five. So she says.” In fact, my grandmother often insisted on the nobility of her background. But something had put her among the peasants. She never explained what.

“That is a distinguished thing. To trace your ancestry to someone in the story of the Forty-seven Ronin.”

“I suppose,” I said dubiously. “But he was the villain. The wrong ronin!”

He laughed again. “That’s quite an admission. Lucky I’m not a spy,” said Sanba.

“I knew you weren’t. They’re fatter and have better clothes. Often they have small beards.”

“Ah,” said Sanba, “it’s true.”

At this point Hokusai came to the door, wiping his hands. His brow was wrinkled. “O-ooei!” He smiled vacantly at Sanba and jerked his head for me to get inside. “O-ooei, can you look to the students?”

“My father will talk to you now.”

“Good grief, my friend,” said Sanba. “She is—what?—twelve at most? I wonder how the students like to be tended by her.”

“She is fifteen. And they should like it. She’s rather good,” said my father with satisfaction.

They began to talk business.

“I am going to write a new vendetta storybook, for which I will need pictures,” said Sanba.

“Ah, one of your formula cheapies? Whose work will you copy this time?”

“Not yours; no one would want it.”

This was their way: to insult each other, and themselves, as often as possible. And they put their heads together. My father called my mother to get tea, and the two men stood happily side by side, at the door, pointing and comparing and nodding. I sat down and began working on the design for a set of combs.

17.

Antics

W
HEN I WAS
not much older, my father left our home.

First he went to live with his friend Bakin, whose novels he illustrated.

“Woe betide Bakin.” My mother laughed. “Hokusai will bring chaos to his home with his dirty clothes and dishes.”

The more successful my father became, the less respect she showed him. “Confusion reigns when Hokusai moves into your mind,” she said.

He stayed with Bakin only a few months. Maybe they did drive each other mad. Or maybe he had finally taken Sadanobu’s warning to heart. There were signs of another crackdown. Soon we saw my father at the door with his woven backpack and pilgrim’s hat. He announced he was setting out “on travels.” It was a clear, chilly day in early spring, with green shoots and the promise of blossoms.

“I hope you have your rainwear packed in that,” my mother said angrily.

He did not, I could tell. There was no room in his pack, and he would reason that he could get a coat along the way when he needed it, maybe by trading a sketch or painting a lady’s fan.

“Why are you going away?” I asked.

“To see things I can paint,” he said.

“If you stand at Nihonbashi, all the things in the world will parade in front of your eyes,” said my mother.

“Not the fisherman on the bank of a quiet river at dawn,” said my father. “Not a rocky waterfall between pine trees. That I can see in Chiba, not in Edo.”

“These are not the subjects of painting,” said my mother with all the haughty air of she-who-knew-nothing. She believed, as most people did, that the only true subjects of painting were the sights of Edo, the fashions worn by the beauties, and the actors with their giant scowls.

“You are a critic now as well, are you?” said Hokusai.

I felt the cut. My sympathies, which were naturally with him, swung over to her. He who lived on respect gave her none. I had seen so many women bob around uselessly, trying to please men with foolish smiles, taking the low seat at dinner, walking paces behind. My mother had once tried; she did not like the result.

“A better one than those fools who call you an artist,” she sniffed. She fought with more cunning these days, having learned a deadlier style from him.

“You know-nothing daughter of the slums.”

Hokusai, who loved to call himself “a peasant of Honjo,” nonetheless taunted her with his suspect high birth. Sometimes I wondered where this man had sprung from. Humble roots or noble, or some unholy mixture? Was his father Nakajima? Had he truly been born from one of the descendants of the enemy in the case of the Forty-seven Ronin?
Whack,
whack
went my heart from one to the other, like a shuttlecock swatted with a racket, back and forth.
Whack,
whack.
It made me dizzy.

Waterfalls and quiet dawns my mother had not seen herself, only heard talk of. Like everyone, she was curious to see the wonders of our country and go to the ends of the national roads that crossed right here at Nihonbashi. I knew she hated her life of drudgery, which she often said was brought on by us children and of course her husband. I added to my “never marry” vow the determination never to have children.

With my father’s absence, I was abandoned. After her bitter announcement at the public bath, Shino had gone silent. I did not go to her brothel for fear of seeing the blind man. Had they married? Would they have children? Courtesans did not, usually. Something to do with the precautions they took when they were working, and certainly the abortions they had, made babies impossible. I was glad.

“Are you traveling alone?”

Hokusai smirked and said, “I left sketches and instructions for Mr. Kenma and Mr. Oburu to copy. You must supervise. Bohachi accompanies me.”

I argued. Mr. Bohachi was a student of the North Star Studio who had worked for the city government and was now retired. He was too old to work and had plenty of money to pay for lessons, but could he walk miles at my father’s speed? He was younger than Hokusai, who was nearly sixty years old now, but he would have no idea how fast or how far that old man walked. “You are jealous,” my father said. I was.

And so, they left. We daughters were to run the studio.

My sisters took my mother’s part in all quarrels, which was odd because they were born of Hokusai’s first wife. They were older, halfway in age between my mother and me. O-Miyo behaved like a cow, making big eyes and swinging her lowered head winningly toward her husband, Shigenobu, still present in the studio as a disciple—and a poor one!—of my father’s. And she indulged that son of hers, who had graduated from tormenting the cats to stealing the neighbors’ food and laundry.

In the studio, disorder reigned while Hokusai was on the premises. His drawings piled up in the corners like dry leaves. The money he made was left in little envelopes here and there: we never knew what happened to it. On the now quiet, now curiously flat days that followed my father’s departure, Tatsu went through the piles of drifting paper in the corners, sorting the dried banana leaves that had wrapped sticky rice from the sketches of children playing with shuttlecocks and the brush paintings of ravens. Tatsu was hardworking and sensible. I liked her, but she tried to boss everyone and often succeeded. She was well organized. But this did not make her a talent, something she failed to understand. Meanwhile, younger brother Sakujiro continued his important education, and my mother tended to him with something like love.

I finished work that was owing. I copied out sketches of trees—cedars with bushy branches going up; willows with thin, wispy ones trailing down. Odd, awkward drawings of women’s hands and feet. He never did those well. Did he forget that women had use of these tools? The thatch roofs of sentry houses. Waves and beaches. Seeing these curling, crawling water ghosts, I remembered how my father and I had played in them. My heart was broken that he had left me with the women.

If I stayed facedown over my painting, I escaped the worst of the chores—cooking and disposing of dirt. Youngest girl but older than the boy: it was a position from which one could abscond, disappear, and I did my best. Shopping was my forte, setting me free on the streets for an hour or two. I loved to walk and to breathe the wind off the water. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of myself in a polished bronze shop mirror. I didn’t seem to be as ugly as they said. But who could tell what others saw? I modeled myself on the cats, which had no idea what they looked like but lived in their bodies with complete, insouciant pleasure. I sometimes even took the ferry up to the Yoshiwara, stopping to see Mitsu and Waki but never hearing a word about Shino. And I dared not ask.

My father took his time “on travels.” The leaves were blowing sideways out of their branches and the nights were cold when we heard he was back in the city.

“Like an animal to his den when the cold comes on,” my mother muttered with satisfaction. He had yet to darken our door. And he did not: we suffered the indignity of knowing he was back in the city for three nights before he appeared.

One day his shadow landed on my paper. I felt his warmth over me in my cold corner. I began to trace his outline—the top of his head and the small bulges beside it that were his ears. Circles: everything is made of circles, he had told me. I crouched low over my paper and did not look up at him. I heard him laugh with pleasure. He nudged me in the back with his knees—our little signal of secret connection. I kept my eyes down so he couldn’t see my tears.

I had learned to make the characters for heaven and earth, and so I made them carefully, first one and then the other, with my brush and I could feel that he was pleased. “Where did you go? How did you return?”

“We walked one way the whole time—forward,” he said, smiling. “We never went backward.” It was our joke.

“So is it true the world is round?”

“We didn’t get far enough to find out—we’ll try another time,” said the Old Man, and he and I cackled with laughter.

I
T WAS WINTER.
Cold but dry, the earth dead and hard as rocks. We needed money. My father went to Gokoku-ji, a temple on the edge of the town. He announced that he was going to paint an enormous picture. His disciples cleared a space in the center of the square—seventy tatami mats by fifty. Tatsu and I were enlisted to push back the people to empty the square. In that space we pasted many sheets of paper together to make one enormous sheet. People stood around the edges gawking. Hokusai brought out a sake cask that was full of
sumi
ink. He had made a broom from hollow stems of the reeds that grew along the river. Lifting his enormous “brush” as if it were as heavy as an axe, pushing it along the paper like a street cleaner, Hokusai began to paint.

He made a circle, then he lifted and spattered the pigment. He made circles within circles, and straight lines next to curved lines. We knew he saw his subject in his mind’s eye, but we did not know what it was. From where we stood, there were only broad and broken lines.

He twirled the broom handle and put a foot up behind him, dancing. The more people laughed, the more he twirled. I worked my way along the edge of the crowd as people shouted out their guesses.

“It’s the coastal highway. The black spots are the inns where you can have a waitress!”

“It’s the mountains to the north.”

Arguments broke out.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is.”

“When did you ever see a mountain?”

“There—in the two lines that meet in a peak.”

“That’s not a mountain, it’s a roofline. No, it isn’t a roof—it’s a broken branch . . . it’s an eyebrow.”

People pushed, craning their necks, but from the flat ground, they could not see, any more than I could see, what my father could see in his mind. In the crowd were some of his artist friends. I also saw government spies, and I saw publishers. I saw the priests who commissioned altarpieces and lamps from us. They circled. But the drawing was too large to be read.